While I agree with the sentiment, one nitpick - "When you buy a Kindle, you are buying a disposable product with a predetermined shelf life. Meanwhile, when you buy a Kobo, you are buying a tool that can be maintained for a decade or more." My Kindle is still going strong after 15 years, including a few years of not using it at all when I was enjoying reading physical books. That longevity is why I'm angry about this. I have a perfectly serviceable device and it's effectively being taken away from me.
The statement can be extended to almost any device indeed. To my dismay, Tolinos/Vivlios (or whatever your country calls the rebranded device) haven’t seen any improvements in forever and the local stores are hard to use.
I’m still using my Kindle Oasis 2nd Gen, plugged off and jailbroken, side loading my old collection or public domain books. No one has made something remotely as nice to use as the Oasis, including Amazon themselves. Jailbreaking was quite easy. The only thing that will kill my Oasis is the battery being nearly impossible to change.
My Kindle 7 has severely degraded battery life now, it barely lasts two weeks. It's got to be about 12 years old now.
The screen's got some little black dots where it fell out of my laptop bag in the back of the Landrover and got squashed under the spare tyre and a toolbox. Even that didn't kill it though, it just gave it a couple of little black dots about the size of a lower-case "o" in the smallest font. I can live with that.
